FITZSIMON, Nicholas (1807-1849), of Castlewood, Frankford, King’s co. of Eden Park, Stillorgan, co. Dublin of 7 Sackville Street, Piccadilly, London, Mdx.

Fitzsimon was born at Broughall Castle, the son of a Catholic military officer, landowner and justice of the peace. His mother was a member of the Magawly family, counts of the Holy Roman Empire.1HP Commons, 1790-1820, ii. 665. His maternal uncle, Francis Philip Magawly (1788-1835), of Temora House, King’s County, was regent of the duchies of Parma and Placentia, 1812-5, and prime minister to archduchess Maria Louisa, 1815-23: Freeman’s Journal, 21 Aug. 1832; Examiner, 8 Sept. 1835; Gent. Mag. (1856), i. 518; Morning Chronicle, 25 Mar. 1856. Having obtained honours at Dublin University, he inherited property valued at £2,000 a year.2Morning Post, 9 Feb. 1841. He soon afterwards became involved in reform politics, joining the subscription committee for John Lawless, the radical and Catholic emancipist in February 1830, and acting as secretary of the King’s County reform meeting at Tullamore, 18 Dec. 1831.3Freeman’s Journal, 6 Feb. 1830, 24 Dec. 1831. In October 1832 he chaired a Liberal meeting there, arguing in favour of the independent interests of the county, and declaring that it was ‘time for the humbler class of electors to be acquainted with their individual weight in the community’.4Freeman’s Journal, 29 Oct. 1832.

In 1829 Fitzsimon had married the daughter of the eminent Dublin whiskey distiller, Sir John Power, an alderman of the corporation and ‘one of the most efficient supporters’ of Daniel O’Connell.5Gent. Mag. (1855), ii. 428. He was therefore brother-in-law to James Power, MP for County Wexford, 1835-7, 1865-8, and also a cousin of Sir Richard Nagle, MP for Westmeath. He was returned at the top of the poll for King’s County at the 1832 general election as a repealer, having received O’Connell’s ‘entire approbation’.6Freeman’s Journal, 10 Oct. 1833’; Gent. Mag. (1849), ii. 317. Because he was ‘exceedingly obese’ Fitzsimon was nicknamed ‘Mr. Fat-Simon’ to distinguish him from Christopher Fitzsimon, the brother-in-law of the Liberator, who sat for County Dublin.7Notes and Queries, 2nd ser., viii (1859), 511. Christopher Fitzsimon had a badly deformed leg ‘and was called Mr. Foot-Simon’. The two men were not related. Although Christopher Fitzsimon did have a brother named Nicholas, he was not, as some historians have supposed, the member for King’s County: Gent. Mag. (1849), ii. 317; Freeman’s Journal, 4 Feb. 1841; Morning Post, 8 Feb. 1841; Standard, 11 Feb. 1841; A. Macintyre, The Liberator. Daniel O’Connell and the Irish Party 1830-1847 (1965), 77, 160; O. MacDonagh, The Emancipist. Daniel O’Connell 1830-1847 (1989), 87. O’Connell’s efforts to secure his own return for Dublin City prevented him from directly assisting Fitzsimon, and the latter only reluctantly agreed to attend O’Connell’s National Council meeting in Dublin in January 1833.8D. O’Connell to P.V. Fitzgerald, 20 Dec. 1832, 10 Jan. 1833, O’Connell Correspondence, ed. M.R. O’Connell, iv. 477-9, v. 2; MacDonagh, The Emancipist, 87; Irish Monthly Magazine, i (1833), 714. He voted in favour of Hume’s resolutions on public economy, 14 Feb. 1833, supported the Irish church temporalities bill, 11 Mar., and opposed the second and third readings of the Irish coercion bill, 11, 29 Mar., deeming it ‘arbitrary’ and ‘most unnecessary’ and claiming that his native county was then ‘in a state of tranquillity’.9Hansard, 8 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, cc. 459-60; 13 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, cc. 576-7. He supported Thomas Attwood’s motion for a committee on distress, 21 Mar. 1833, divided in favour of the abolition of military flogging, 2 Apr., backed Matthias Attwood’s motion on currency reform, 24 Apr., and voted for the ballot, 25 Apr., on the subject of which he was the author of several pamphlets.10Gent. Mag. (1849), ii. 317. He also divided in favour of the measure, 23 June 1836, and 15 Feb. 1838. He supported the removal of Jewish disabilities, 22 May (and would do so again in 1835), and sat on the select committee on the Dublin and Kingstown ship canal that June. Later that month he opposed O’Connell by voting to bring the repeal question before parliament in the present session, and divided in favour of retrenchment, 30 July 1833.11PP 1833 (591) xvi. 451; Freeman’s Journal, 15 June 1833.

Fitzsimon opposed the removal of the malt tax, 27 Feb. 1834 (and would do so again, 10 Mar. 1835), and divided against Lord Althorp’s motion for the replacement of church rates with a central grant raised from land tax, 21 Apr. He did, however, vote for the repeal of the Union, 29 Apr. 1834 (O’Connell had to contradict a report that Fitzsimon had behaved towards him ‘in an unfriendly manner’ during Henry Lambert’s attack upon the Irish leader in the debate).12Morning Chronicle, 22 May 1834; Hansard, 25 Apr. 1834, vol. 23, cc. 29-41. He voted for shorter parliaments, 15 May 1834, and sat on the select committee on the navigation of the river Shannon that June. In July he moved the third reading of the Kingstown improvement bill.13Parliamentary Test Book (1835), 61; PP 1834 (532) xvii. 141; Standard, 10 July 1834.

In 1835 Fitzsimon was re-elected unopposed as a Reformer, presenting himself as ‘the undeviating supporter of the people’s rights’, an ‘uncompromising opponent’ of Irish tithes, and an enemy of the ‘Tory administration’.14Parliamentary Test Book (1835), 61. He opposed the government on the amendment to the address, 26 Feb. 1835, and divided against Charles Manners Sutton as speaker, 19 Feb. 1835. He supported the right of parliament to dispose of church property, 2 Apr. 1835, and opposed Peel’s motion on the Irish Church, 23 July 1835. However, although he expressed ‘unlimited confidence’ in Melbourne’s reappointed administration, he remained critical of its dependence on Irish coercion.15Hansard, 31 July 1835, vol. 29, c. 1333. He did, however, support the Whigs on the address, 4 Feb. 1836, and voted for the ill-fated Irish municipal corporations bill, 28 Mar., opposing the Lords’ amendments, 10 June, and dividing in favour of the government’s motion on Irish tithes, 3 June.

By 1837 Fitzsimon was generally regarded as a Whig and was returned unopposed at the general election.16R.B. Mosse, The Parliamentary Guide (1837), 164. Unlike O’Connell, he opposed the repeal of the property qualification for MPs, 14 Feb. 1837, but the following year joined the ‘curious coalition’ of Radicals and Tories which backed O’Connell’s opposition to the second reading of the Irish poor law bill, 5 Feb. 1838, voted with the small minority that supported O’Connell’s hostile motion, 9 Feb, and divided against the bill’s third reading, 30 Apr.17P. Gray, The Making of the Irish Poor Law, 1815-43 (2009), 197-200. He sat on the Salford and Kingston-upon-Hull election committees in February and March 1838, and backed the ministry over its Canadian policy, 7 Mar. 1838, and opposed a motion to reconsider the corn laws, 15 Mar. (and would again, 18 Mar. 1839).18Mirror of Parliament (1838), 1609, 2727; PP 1837-38 (433) xi. 1. He may also have sat on the select committee on the petitions of hand-loom weavers in June 1834, and the committee of privileges in February 1837: PP 1834 (556) x. 1; PP 1835 (341) xiii. 1; PP 1837 (45) xiii. 203. He paired in favour of the appropriation of the surplus revenues of the Irish Church, 15 May 1838, and in January 1839 defended the ministry against an attack by the earl of Charleville following the assassination of the 2^nd earl of Norbury. He subsequently condemned Lord Oxmantown’s ‘philippic against his old friends and constituents’ in King’s county, and denied in the House that the viceroy, Lord Normanby, wanted ‘sympathy with the suffering of the Irish people’.19Freeman’s Journal, 12, 24 Jan. 1839; Hansard, 7 Mar. 1839, vol. 46, c. 106. Having supported the Irish municipal corporations bill, 8 Mar. 1839, he backed the ministry over the general conduct of the Irish administration, 19 Apr., and the suspension of the Jamaican constitution, 6 May, and voted for Charles Shaw Lefevre as speaker, 27 May. After once more backing the ministry in a confidence vote, 31 Jan. 1840, he opposed Lord Stanley’s Irish registration bill, 26 Mar., and divided in favour of the government’s conduct towards China, 9 Apr. 1840.

Fitzsimon’s loyalty to the Whig ministry was eventually rewarded, and he unexpectedly took the Chiltern Hundreds, 5 Feb. 1841, in order to assume the ‘comparatively insignificant’ office of a Dublin police magistrate.20Freeman’s Journal, 4, 16 Feb. 1841. It was remarked, however, that a ‘county Member content to accept a situation of 461l. odd is not the most strange occurrence in this age of wonders’: Morning Post, 8 Feb. 1841. He sought to answer Conservative complaints that the position should go to ‘an avowed repealer’ by stating publicly that the government was fully aware of his ‘total change in opinion’ on that question. This, in turn, provoked the Irish Liberal press to accuse him of having misrepresented himself to his constituents at the previous two elections in order to barter his seat to the Whigs.21Standard, 11, 19 Feb. 1841; Morning Post, 12 Feb. 1841; Freeman’s Journal, 17 Feb. 1841. He served as a police magistrate until January 1848, when he was awarded the much more lucrative position (at £1,200 per annum) of inspector-general of Irish prisons. He received a knighthood at Dublin Castle from earl Fortescue, viceroy of Ireland, in September 1841.22Standard, 6 Jan. 1848; Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, xvi (1849), 614; Examiner, 11 Sept. 1841; Shaw’s Knightage, ii. 344.

Fitzsimon remained in government service until his sudden death in July 1849, when he was seized with ‘an attack of apoplexy’ at his seat, Broughall Castle. A monument was subsequently erected to his memory in Kilcormac Church.23Standard, 27 July 1849; The Times, 3 Aug. 1849; Hampshire Telegraph & Sussex Chronicle, 4 Aug. 1849; P.F. Meehan, The Members of Parliament for Laois and Offaly (Queen’s and King’s Counties), 1801-1918 (1983), 127.